The Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (HKU IDS) is pleased to share that Xubin REN, one of its Year 3 PhD candidates, has been selected for the 2025 “AI25 AI Innovation Pioneers Under 25” list.

Jointly initiated by Sequoia China and MIT Technology Review China, AI25 recognises young researchers, engineers, open-source contributors, and entrepreneurs under the age of 25 who are contributing to the development and application of artificial intelligence.

Supervised by Prof Chao Huang at IDS, Xubin conducts research across large language models, recommender systems, retrieval-augmented generation, multimodal understanding, and autonomous agents. His work examines how advances in AI models can be translated into practical, scalable systems that support real-world users and workflows. Xubin is also the creator and maintainer of nanobot, an open-source lightweight personal AI agent. 

His current work is extending from the application of large language models in recommendation and retrieval systems towards the development of next-generation agent runtimes and infrastructure. Through lightweight architecture, open-source collaboration, and practical workflow validation, he aims to advance AI agents beyond conversational interfaces towards systems capable of understanding context, using tools, executing tasks, and supporting sustained human–AI collaboration.

Congratulations to Xubin on this recognition and his continued contributions to AI research and open-source innovation.